“XFR STN” began with a proposal to the New Museum from Alan W. Moore, who, in the spirit of his practice (Moore is a founding member of Colab), was looking for a partner. Described as an artistic project as well as a public service, “XFR STN” was conceived by Moore to address a specific context—some eight hundred videotapes in a storage bin in Staten Island, amassed during the life of the Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club (MWF)—but also a general condition. Significant amounts of the past four decades of artistic production are trapped on obsolete storage media (from U-Matic tapes to floppy disks). For many artists, the cost of digitization and recovery of this obsolete media is prohibitive. Museums and other art institutions are also faced with tough choices around preservation: which artworks to prioritize, and even more urgent, perhaps, how to ensure that works by less- or not-known artists don’t continue to disappear with the format that they live on. In other words: how to preserve the possibility of discovering works, especially those contained in obsolete formats, that are not already written into versions of the canon.

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